What HDD?

[ubersonic]

Hiya, some advise please as im not the best on hard drives, my current motherboard is a XFX 750I INTEL 775 DDR2 Motherboard and im using a 80gb Seagate Barracuda ATA/133 HDD (dont laugh) and im looking to upgrade, my cpu is a Q9600 and I have 4gb of DDR2-1066 in duel channel.

The HDD proberbly seems a bit lackluster for the system but until now ive been doing mostly CPU intensive work with little to no HDD use. Things have changed and I now requre something faster, I have the following options:

1: instal a ADAPTEC 29160 PCI-64 card I have spare in one of the PCI slots (card is PCI 64/32 compatible) and use a 15000rpm 72k U320 drive (which is backwards comp with U160 cards) I also have spare

2: buy a Samsung EcoGreen F3 500GB (my board is SATA II) for £39

3: try and get a 74gb raptor 10k from ebay cheap

I dont care about drive size or sustained transfers much its fast burst access im after for quickl loading small files into memory, so any ideas? I dont mind spending £40 on a F3 but will it be faster than the SCSI drive? if so how much, the SCSI drive is a U320 but its connected to a U160 adapter which is in a PCI slot so I guess it will be limited to a max of 133mb/s transfer? how will this effect it compared to the F3? and how does the raptor fit into my plans?

Thank you very muc for the help

 

[ubersonic]

thanks, so im looking at £45 for the F3 then...

btw the stats on my spare SCSI drive are:

Size: 73GB
Speed: 15,000RPM
Interface: SCSI 68pin
Sustained Throughput (MBps): 56.1 to 86.0
Average Seek Time (read/write ms): 3.6 / 4.0
Interface: SCSI LVD U320 - 320MBps 16-bit
Cache: 8MB

 

[ubersonic]

thanks for the info, my choice is defiantly between the F3 (non eco) and my Cheetah now

do you know how faster the F3 would be? worth spending £45? I don't care about the noise/heat from the Cheetah.

Also would a single U160 HDD actually bottleneck on the PCI bus? I know my U160 adapter was aimed at the PCI-64 market but that was because you can connect a truckload of drives to it. Will one U160 HDD be enough to saturate the PCI bus? (my dvd drive is SATA)

 

[ubersonic]

It seems the universe does sort itself out, a family member needs a new hdd so im going to buy them a F3 and test it and the cheetah in my rig to see what works best, then ill keep them the best one ^^

Thanks for all the help